“Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home” by Stephen Starring Grant

c.2025, Simon & Schuster $29.99 287 pages

Junk mail, junk mail, advertisement. And two bills. It’s quiet in your mailbox today but who knows what you’ll get next time. A package? A check, a card from Great Aunt Mary, it’s a surprise every day. And as you’ll learn in the new book “Mailman” by Stephen Starring Grant, you have one workforce to thank. The call came as a shock-not-shock. After moving his family to Blacksburg, Virginia to raise his kids in his hometown, Stephen Starring Grant landed a plumb job with a challenging commute, no big deal, just a logistics thing. And so it was, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, that he stood in a nearly-empty airport in North Carolina, phone in hand, suddenly laid off from his job. With no income and a dwindling savings account, Grant applied for “anything I was even remotely qualified for… and there was never a snowball’s chance of me getting any of them.” That was discouraging. Then he learned that the United States Postal Service was hiring. A short wait to be accepted, two weeks of training, and a huge learning curve later, Grant was an official, sworn-in, real-life USPS mail carrier. It took months for him to feel comfortable. Your mail is sorted before the carrier gets it, he says, and then the carrier sorts it again, by house number into a large contraption called a “case.” Packages go in a “cage.” A mail carrier must remember one or multiple routes and there is no cheat-sheet, which can complicate a rural route in mountain country. Furthermore, it’s an acrobatic endeavor: in smaller towns around the country, deliveries are often made from a carrier’s private vehicle, from a passenger seat, one leg stretched across the cab.

So many times, Grant thought about quitting. He made mistakes. He was frustrated. He was late getting back to the office. And then suddenly one day, “I had become a mailman.” We joke. We poke fun at the USPS, complain and switch to bill-paying online. Still, a walk to the box is pure anticipation. It’s a treat to see what’s in that mailbox, and inside “Mailman.” And yet, all is not smooth. Though there are many irrelevant asides and chapters that would be more suitable for another kind of book, “Mailman” is funny, profane, but fun to read. Author Stephen Starring Grant is quick to admit his total befuddlement with his new job, quick to say that he got emotional over it, he easily admits when things got rough and he pokes a lot of fun at himself, which lightens every letter of this story. Part of his problem with the job – and another issue with this book – is the terminology and trying to remember what’s what, and where. Grant admits that he struggled with that, and readers will, too. Still, most readers will laugh out loud, and they’ll love knowing more about the USPS and its inner workings. If you want an unusual memoir that opens the doors with a behind-the-curtain peek, find “Mailman.” It delivers.